What if you could get an entire year’s worth of work done in just 12 short weeks? It really could be as simple as changing your time perspective. Instead of treating 2014 as an entire year, shift your yearly perspective into a quarterly perspective. By forcing timely deadlines, people are often able to execute ideas much more efficiently, which ultimately makes them more productive.

How can you transition from a 12 month set of goals to a 3 month set of goals that accomplish the very same thing?

Streamline Your Overall Vision

You’re not going to go anywhere until you get your vision of how things should be sorted out. You’re also not going to really go anywhere special if you just stay within your comfort zone! In order to increase your productivity by 400%, you’ve got to constantly think outside of the box for ways to accomplish your goals. If you’re not willing to become uncomfortable to find greater overall success, then you’re not really looking for success, are you?

Create an Achievable Plan

The problem that many people have with goals is that they try to be great at everything. One of the easiest ways to increase productivity, however, is to be great at just a few things or even just one thing. By finding your niche and then perfecting it so that you’re the best there is, people will come to you because you’re the expert at what you do. To get to that point, you need to outline a specific plan of action that will help you achieve your vision.

Perfect Your Process

It’s one thing to have a set of plans that you put down on paper. The nature of experience is the realization that previously conceived plans almost always don’t work out as envisioned. By being flexible and adaptable, you’ll be able to implement your plan by controlling the processes needed to achieve the vision and plan.

Distractions are another killer of productivity and often it is because interruptions are often seen as emergency situations. The simple truth is that not everything needs to be done immediately. Urgent matters will always arise and sometimes they do need an immediate response, but by controlling the overall process you’ll be able to stay out of the temptation to do everything right now.

Define Success

How do you know if you’ve actually achieved success? Without any metrics, you really don’t have the ability to define how successful you’ve been. How do you set up your own metrics. First, you must determine what it takes to achieve your plan. What will the final outcome of your vision actually be? What processes do you need in order to accomplish multiple goals of your overarching goal? Answer those questions and you’ll have some metrics.

Most importantly, however, to be 400% productive, you must always be in control of yourself. If you allow seconds to slip by, that is time that can never be reclaimed! Carve out your own niche, keep distractions to a minimum, and you’ll be able to accomplish more than you ever thought possible!

For people who are hunting down success, one important question should be asked: are you happy right now? People who are choosing to be consistently happy are also the people who generally find greater success in life! It isn’t about being lucky all the time or having more opportunities than others may have. It’s about taking your opportunities, working hard to create a successful environment using all of your tools, and allowing yourself to be happy no matter the outcome.

Are you ready to choose happiness… and ultimately choose success?

Take Care of Yourself Every Single Day

One of the core components of finding success is to take care of the problems that other people are facing. In order to take care of the problems that others are facing, however, you must also be willing to take time for yourself every day. There are a number of ways that you can take some time out of the day to take care of yourself:

take time to exercise every day,

give yourself 20 – 30 minutes of solitary time so you can meditate, or

develop healthy habits that pull you toward successful outcomes.

Just as someone can be pulled into eating sweets because they taste good and that makes them feel good, someone can also be pulled into healthy habits because they do the same thing. By taking care of yourself better, you’ll be in a better position to do more, to help more, and that’s what brings success!

Get Into a Consistent Daily Wake-Up Routine

When the weekend arrives, it can be extremely tempting to just sleep in for awhile because there are no responsibilities that are demanding to be met. Yet people who have a consistent daily wake-up routine that they use every day are actually happier and more successful. Why is that? Because it comes down to what we just discussed – taking care of yourself. When you feel fresh and focused in the morning, you’re ready to attack the day. When you don’t, you’re defending against the day.

Take Time To Disengage From the Day

Just as a morning routine that is consistent is important, an evening routine is as well. Being able to process the events of the day and to then disengage from them can help to quiet a racing mind, calm the thoughts, and ultimately bring about a deeper, more refreshing sleep. There are a number of different ways to disengage, but what you decide to do must be comfortable and familiar enough to you that it can help your mind sort through any bothersome thoughts or emotions during that time. It could be a walk, a familiar television show, or a few minutes of mindfulness meditation – if it works for you, then make the choice to do it!

Choosing success and happiness might be something that needs to be done every day, but as with any good habit, once you establish it, the habit will pull you toward it. Begin that process now so that you can experience the happiness and success that you want in life!

For many, the morning routine is one that is filled with dread. Plodding through breakfast and getting dressed for the day, thoughts turn to what can be done after work instead of enjoying what happens during work. If the average person spends 40 hours per day working at a job and all of those hours are miserable, then nearly one quarter of life is a negative experience!

Life doesn’t have to be that way. Here are some tips to help you make work become one of your happy places:

1. Incorporate your organization’s mission into your daily job routines. Most companies have a very clear and concise mission statement. Many are similar to something like this: “We strive every day to improve the lives of our customers in a brand new way.” How can you make that idea become a reality for you as you take care of your daily tasks? By working to inspire others, we often inspire ourselves because we can connect our lives to the lives of those we’re helping in some way with our job.

2. Let your talents drive you at work. Even if you’re in a job that you don’t prefer, you can still let your talents flow with every task. If you’re a natural salesperson, for example, but you work as an administrative assistant, you could utilize your talent for sales to create convincing documents that further your company’s mission. Talents often get noticed… even if they aren’t always outspokenly appreciated all the time!

3. Challenge yourself with short-term goals. Employers are notoriously bad for not providing a lot of feedback about your job performance. Just because they don’t set goals for you, however, doesn’t mean that you can’t set goals for yourself! By setting short-term goals that excite and drive you, you’ll always be at the top of your game at work and producing quality work.

4. When you meet one of your goals, don’t forget to reward yourself! Rewards are always part of the achievement process. Without rewards, there is ultimately very little to motivate someone to continue finding success. You can reward yourself in a number of ways, from a day of pampering on one of your day’s off to a gadget you’ve always wanted or even just a mental health sick day that you take after the job is done so you can relax with your favorite movies. Whatever it is you like to do, make sure you do it after a job well done

5. Focus on the quality of the work, not the outcome of the work. A quality job will always produce a quality outcome, but often the outcome is looked at before the quality of the work. By focusing on the fine details of a job and working hard to create an as close to perfect product as possible, the outcomes will naturally come along for the ride. Take pride in always doing a good job!

You don’t have to allow a quarter of your life to be negative every year. Implement these tips to make work a happier place and you may just find that life will become much happier too!

It’s easy to fall into the habit of procrastination. When something doesn’t have to be done right away, it seems like there would be little harm of putting off work today that isn’t due until tomorrow, right? The problem with this thought pattern is that it establishes a habit of procrastinating that makes it much easier to put off overdue work as well.

Here’s how you can defeat the habit of procrastination today so that your day today and tomorrow can be extremely productive:

1. Set new deadlines for yourself. When a deadline seems like a long way away, it is very easy to put off doing something for a day or two… or three. People are deadline-orientated and so they will not work until they absolutely must work, which then causes a large push to get a task done right at the deadline. Try instead to set new deadlines for yourself on long-term projects, daily deadlines that have achievable goals attached to them. This way you’ll get work done every day and won’t have to rush at the end.

2. Why do you want to procrastinate on this task? Though procrastination is often associated with laziness, it is often associated with specific emotional states more than physical inactivity. Most commonly, a task is put off because it is:

not fun to do,

will cause disharmony in some way,

doesn’t make someone feel good, or

is labor-intensive or very difficult to accomplish.

By examining the emotional states that are causing you to procrastinate, you can determine what your unique issue is and develop a coping mechanism to counter it. By casting away these negative emotions, you probably won’t enjoy the work more, but it will get done today! There’s also a great reward at the end – nothing feels better than accomplishing a task that you’d normally procrastinate on!

3. There will be roadblocks. No matter how much a project is planned in advance, there are going to be roadblocks that occur that will attempt to make you put off doing the work that needs to get done. It could be as simple as that coworker standing at your desk with a cup of coffee, endlessly discussing the merits of white pants over blue pants. On the other hand, you could end up with a technical issue that prevents you from doing work the way you normally would. By planning for roadblocks ahead of time and creating escape scenarios that will let you keep working, you’ll be able to stay ahead of the temptation to procrastinate.

4. Be resilient with your resistance. Excuses are a dime a dozen and everyone has got some good ones. Stand up to these excuses and resist procrastination. When you do, it will flee from you! Others may try to drag you down or encourage you to put some work off too. Just stand firm, discuss your plans to get the job done, and then knuckle down on the task. That comes when you make getting your job completed a top priority.

Procrastination can strike at any time! The good news is that you can defeat procrastination before it ever takes a foothold on your life with these tips. Implement them today and see just how productive you can be!